Exponential growth by way of good design is the secret behind every startup’s scaling success story and adopting a design thinking perspective can help you attain or sustain such growth. Leading a design thinking workshop will place human-centered thinking at the heart of your company, resulting in rapid growth and increased customer satisfaction.

With a focus on design methodology, you can respond to changing customer needs through innovation as scalability and design thinking are indelibly connected. By leading a design workshop, you’ll make human-centered thinking part of your company culture. Companies like ours, Voltage Control, offer advice, guidance, training and consulting to companies of all sizes and across verticals.

More than a trend, the power of design thinking for scaling is backed by statistics:

• Every dollar that goes into design methodology and user experience results in a $100 return. (Source: Forbes)
• 50% of design-led businesses report increased customer loyalty as a result of advanced design practices. (Source: Adobe)
• In the last 10 years, design-led businesses have surpassed the S&P Index by 219%. (Source: Design Management Institute)

In this article we’ll explore the basics of design-centric thinking and its effect on your company’s growth with the following topics:

• Growing With Design Methodology
• What is Design Thinking?
• Why Design Thinking is Essential to Success
• The Five-Step Process to Design Thinking
• How to Get Your Team on Board with Design Methodology
• Why Leading a Design Thinking Workshop Teaches Scalability
• Steps to Leading a Design Thinking Workshop

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Growing With Design Methodology

Centering a design-driven mentality will help your business prioritize innovation and creativity, allowing for increased ingenuity, productivity, and efficiency. With a shift to design-centered thinking comes increased creativity and more remarkable growth, allowing companies to scale faster than usual. By leading a design workshop at your company, you can completely transform your company culture and the very essence of how your business works.

What is Design Thinking?

Before leading a design thinking workshop for your team, the first step is to understand the concept for yourself. Design thinking incorporates a human-centered approach to problem-solving via design methodology. Design methodology stems from the idea of design itself. As “good design” is all about finding an elegant solution to the problems at hand, design thinking encourages your team to make the most appropriate plan to meet both your company’s needs and that of the end-user.

Why Design Thinking is Essential to Success

Design thinking is integral to your success as a business. Success and design are linked through the latter’s unique ability to engage clients and build connections with customers. By leading a design thinking workshop, you can center design methodology as a business asset.

Beyond essential aesthetics, “good design” focuses on optimum functionality while providing users with an enjoyable, satisfying experience. By meeting both the company’s needs and that of the user, design thinking has a transformative effect on how companies do business.

The Five-Step Process to Design Thinking

Successfully leading a design thinking workshop starts with understanding the following five steps of design thinking:

1. Empathizing with the Client
   As design thinking focuses on uniting function and form to problem solve, you should focus on examining issues with a human lens. By adopting the end user’s mindset, your team will find the most attractive solutions by taking the client’s motivations, needs, pain points, and experiences into consideration.
2. Defining the Problem
   With design in mind, define the problem by prioritizing the end user’s needs first and thinking about the company’s needs second.
3. Ideating the Solution
   This stage of design thinking is all about innovation and ingenuity, as ideas are the lifeblood of design thinking. By generating as many ideas as possible, your team will arrive at new and creative solutions to the issue defined in the second step.
4. Developing Prototypes
   Taking the best ideas from the ideation phase, have your team create prototypes. Track the prototypes’ performance with your team and note their observations. Prototypes will be refined, sent for further testing, or rejected.
5. Testing the Prototypes
   During this stage, the final refinements are made to the prototypes and tested with the end-user. This process is repeated as necessary.

How to Get Your Team on Board with Design Methodology

Making the shift from being a product-driven business to a design-driven one isn’t easy. If you’d like to shift your company into a design-centric mentality, leading a design thinking workshop is the best way forward. Whether your team is actively thinking with design in mind or is entirely new to the concept, making the change is possible.

As you head into leading a design thinking workshop for your team, be sure to share the benefits of a design-centric approach for scaling. As design thinking aims to create a high-quality product, your team will be able to gain a deeper understanding of what your clients want and use design-centric thinking to meet their needs.

Likewise, design methodology prioritizes understanding the customer journey, learning to meet their needs, and creating a perfect product, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and more significant growth for your company.

Why Leading a Design Thinking Workshop Teaches Scalability

One of the main deliverables of leading a design thinking workshop is the facilitation framework or template that your team can rely on in future workshops. This consistent methodology and approach to problem-solving will become a way of life for your company. By putting users first through centering design, you’ll be on your way to sustainable scaling.

To get started leading a design thinking workshop with growth in mind, consider hiring an expert facilitator. With the help of the facilitators at Voltage Control, you can teach your team the ropes of design methodology as you learn how to apply it to your standard operations.

Steps to Leading a Design Thinking Workshop

Consider facilitating a workshop yourself if you’re ready to scale your company and have a great handle on design thinking methodology. Teaching elegant problem-solving skills with a people-first approach is at the heart of all design workshops.

Leading a design thinking workshop can take on many forms, but there are vital elements that will help you succeed each time:

Preparation

Each design thinking workshop starts with preparation. Before the workshop begins, make it a point to:

1. Identify challenges
2. Choose the ideal location
3. Plan the agenda
4. Gather necessary materials

Begin with a Briefing

As the focus of a design thinking workshop is to help your team innovate, activities that can stimulate conversation and ideation take center stage. Consider icebreakers and activities that help break down barriers.

Step One: Introducing Design Thinking

It’s always essential to include an intro to the design thinking methodology to make sure all colleagues and clients know what design-centric thinking is. Whether you show a presentation or hire a professional, explaining the fundamentals for design-centric thinking will help set the stage for the rest of the workshop.

Step Two: Empathizing With the User

As empathy is key to design methodology, empathizing with the client is the next part of the design workshop. By understanding the user’s needs, your team will be able to arrive at the most innovative solutions.

Design thinking exercises are a key component of this stage to help all participants identify how the end-user feels and thinks.

Step Three: Identifying Problems and Solutions

As growth results from effective problem solving, step three involves identifying the problem and creating innovative solutions. Through their brainstorming, your team should ultimately arrive at one solution that will provide the greatest user experience.

Step Four: Finalizing the Workshop

After completing the ideation and problem-solving steps, the workshop will come to a close. When leading a design thinking workshop, be sure to check in with all participants to ensure a meaningful experience was shared by all.

Ultimately, the takeaway of a successful design thinking workshop is human-centered problem-solving. As the meeting comes to an end, make sure your team members can confidently apply the skills learned in the workshop to their daily routines.

Growing Through Design-Centric Culture

The key to growing your business lies in your team’s ability to shift into a design-centered mindset. Leading a design thinking workshop will help you and your team adopt a more innovative way of working. With a newfound design-centric approach to growing your company, you’ll be able to meet clients’ needs, connect with the end-user, and scale your company at an impressive rate.

As you learn more about leading a design thinking workshop, consider hiring a professional facilitator from Voltage Control. With an expert in design thinking present, you’ll ensure that your team successfully makes the shift from a results-driven and product-centric mindset to more human-centered and design-focused processes.

Want To Lead A Design Thinking Workshop?

If you are ready to begin shifting your team into a design-centered mindset join one of our innovative trainings, design thinking facilitation, or  design sprints. Voltage Control’s experts will guide you through your choice of experiential, interactive learning workshops, and coaching sessions where individuals and teams learn and practice how to successfully apply the best of today’s innovation methodologies and facilitation techniques to any business challenge. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you have any questions about our innovative training!

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We all know that it helps to have an outside perspective, both in our personal and professional lives. We call a trusted friend to tell them what’s going on because they help us see things in a fresh light. The same is true in business. Often we need an outside opinion to help us take a step back, look at our business challenge from a new angle and provide valuable insight.

That’s where innovation strategy consulting comes in. An innovation consultant is an advisor who can provide new tools and methods for tackling your problem. If you’re stuck in a project, need to rethink an existing one, or are kicking off an initiative that has to go well, consider an innovation consulting firm.

What is innovation strategy consulting?

Companies like ours, Voltage Control, offer advice, guidance, training and consulting to companies of all sizes and across verticals. Whether you are a brand new startup or a seasoned, large organization, you can benefit from innovation strategy consulting. First, innovation consulting firms will work with you to identify the exact problem you need to solve. These will often be larger, cross-functional challenges. For example, your problem might be: we need a shared vision for our end-to-end customer experience. Or, we need to address a specific customer pain point and align our mobile strategy accordingly (which is what we helped Adobe with). 

An innovation consulting firm can help you hone in on the right questions to ask for your specific challenge.

An innovation consulting firm can help you hone in on the right questions to ask for your specific challenge. They often bring a blend of expertise from everything from enterprise design thinking and human-centered design to product design. They can work with you to think of novel ideas and approaches you haven’t considered before and make a strategic plan for executing on your new strategy.

“The consultant also has a professional responsibility to ask whether the problem as posed is what most needs solving. Very often the client needs help most in defining the real issue…” — Arthur N. Turner, “Consulting Is More Than Giving Advice,” HBR, 1982.

Here are the top six benefits of innovation strategy consulting:

Break Old Habits

One of the first benefits of innovation strategy consulting is that it helps you shake up your typical way of doing things. Most companies have ingrained habits. Maybe it’s the way you hold meetings, how you present to the group, or how projects get funded and designed. Some of these patterns exist for a reason; others are leftover, legacy ways of working that don’t serve a purpose. The reasons for doing these things are often referred to as simply “just the way things have always been done.”

An innovation consulting firm comes in and helps you look at what you should (or could) be doing better rather than how it’s always been done. Their outsider’s perspective means you’re less inclined to follow the well-worn paths of your organization and challenge the status quo. 

Wisdom from Outside Industries

Another benefit of innovation consulting is that your innovation consulting firm likely comes with a plethora of expertise in many industries and types of companies. Let’s say you’re in the financial technology business. Hopefully, your innovation consulting firm has some knowledge of your industry, but they will also bring expertise from adjacent or even unrelated sectors and fields. This is a good thing. You want outside inspiration if you’re going to make something innovative.

Because consultants usually work with companies of different sizes and in different markets, they can bring a diversity of knowledge to the table. Who knows, maybe your fintech company can learn something breakthrough from the food delivery startup your innovation consulting firm just worked with.

Focus Your Time

Typically, you’ll work with your innovation consulting firm through semi-formal meetings or workshops. This dedicated time to focus on critical business challenges is invaluable. That’s because many of us are overscheduled and incredibly busy trying to get our “day job” done. We don’t have time to squeeze innovation work into the tiny cracks of free space in our 9 to 5. But, we all want it to happen.

When you bring on an innovation consulting firm, you give yourself freedom and time. Now, you can focus on a problem you’ve meant to tackle but haven’t been able to. (For example, check out this case study about the food delivery company Favor and how they used a Design Sprint to focus their attention on a critical business need). Innovation consulting firms will usually bring in an expert facilitator to help guide meetings and conversations. A facilitator is someone who plans, designs, and leads a key group meeting or event and can help when dealing with larger topics. They offer a non-biased opinion and take care of logistics while making sure everyone stays on track. 

While you might be overwhelmed at the prospect of setting aside a whole day or week for innovation exercises or a Design Sprint when you’re busy, the results are worth it. Innovation consulting firms help you take the time to work on big problems in a collaborative way with your colleagues. With their help, you can shift from thinking about the day-to-day to working on game-changing innovation initiatives. Innovation consulting firms help you accelerate, disrupt and sustain innovation within your team and organization.

Innovation consulting firms help you take the time to work on big problems in a collaborative way with your colleagues.

Articulate Your Vision

In addition to being too busy, it’s hard for some companies to articulate their innovation strategy or to shape a compelling story for where they want to go. This is another benefit of innovation consulting firms. Through your engagement with your innovation consultancy, you will come up with a north star. Your north star articulates your vision for your product, feature, or experience.

Typically, your innovation consulting firm delivers a document that summarizes where you want to go and why. They might even help you create a prototype of your ideal, future experience. A good innovation consulting firm will articulate what you accomplished through a shareable document or prototype that will help you rally your team or organization, and get things done.

Make Connections

Innovation consulting firms are often very connected and have an extensive network of people in the business, tech and creative communities. So, if you need to engage with new people and companies to execute on your innovative vision, your innovation consulting firm might be able to help. For example, if you want to hire a team of developers or find a company to help you with brand identity, your innovation consulting firm probably knows a plethora of talented, trusted candidates. They can help connect you to the people and companies you might not have access to so that you can build your product or experience.

Learn Through Doing

One of the last benefits of hiring an innovation consulting firm is that you and your team will learn new ways of working through the process. Today, many companies have their teams do some design thinking training but don’t always show them how to put it into practice. Watching your innovation consulting firm at work is a way to see how design thinking happens in practice.

Your innovation consulting firm will walk you through their tried-and-true methods and activities. These may include innovation training strategies or Liberating Structures. If you pay attention and take a few notes, you can leverage these tools, resources and processes on your own the next time. When your team sees an expert innovation consultant in action, they’ll learn the methods through osmosis. They’ll be able to try the techniques on their own down the road when they want to spark innovative thinking, and ultimately drive a culture of innovation.

Need Innovation Consulting?

Companies are complex with their own unique set of structures and challenges. That’s why we build and curate custom workshops to find solutions based on your team’s exact needs. Voltage Control’s experts will guide you through your choice of experiential, interactive learning workshops, and coaching sessions where individuals and teams learn and practice how to successfully apply the best of today’s innovation methodologies and facilitation techniques to any business challenge. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you want to learn more about innovation training, design sprints, or design thinking facilitation.

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We have all seen a crime drama or mystery where the investigator stands in front of a pinboard and on it are multiple photos of leads, clues, and locations–everything connected with a thread allowing a pattern to emerge. This is an example of what can be created in real-time with a group of people problem-solving. Imagine a high-functioning space for idea sharing, collaboration, and unleashing everyone’s potential by designing your meeting or workshop with parallel creation in mind.

Traditional Meeting Spaces

It is very easy for a meeting to start and remain headed in one direction. We’ve all been there: a question is posed and eyes are averted, no one wants to be the first to speak. The Harvard Business Review has found that not only have meetings increased in length and frequency overthe past 50 years, but executives, on average, spend nearly 23 hours a week in them. How do we make meetings more efficient?

We need to be collaborative and get as many great ideas out in one meeting rather than in multiple meetings. Multi-threaded meetings create concept direction and give everyone a safe space to share their unique ideas. That is where real growth happens. That is where the game-changing ideas are born. Teamwork is essential to creating and maintaining a productive and stimulating work environment.

Harvard Business Review – 

“We surveyed 182 senior managers in a range of industries: 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work. 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together.”

There is a general consensus that the multitude of workplace meetings is a necessary evil. Most people find that they dread multiple weekly meetings, but they feel that is the only way to ensure innovation, even at the cost of productivity and engagement. In order to create a streamlined meeting process, we first need to ask, “Will this environment nurture ideas?” Whether your meeting space is digital or in person, does every member of your team feel like they have room to share and contribute to the board? Once you established the most conducive working environment, ideas can be shared in parallel among team members, and that momentum unleashes the potential of every person in your workspace. Imagine what you and your company can accomplish in one meeting if there is nothing that holds creative collaboration back!

The Why

Have you ever attempted to plan a party? The list of tasks seems endless and daunting! You approach it one thing at a time, finishing a single task before moving on to the next. Applying this parallelism to a meeting, doesn’t it make so much more sense to assign each person to one task, where everyone executes in parallel, rather than trying to accomplish one thing at a time serially? Efficiency, strategy, and trust means a more satisfying meeting experience! A  multi-threaded meeting is like a well planned party. Invite everyone to bring forth all their ideas and share in real time to unlock the full potential of participants in your meetings. Discovering the power to unleash that potential in a meaningful way changes the outcome of the meeting, the company, and the individual!

Digital Inclusivity

When it comes to working remotely, there has been significant research showing that it’s not about where your team is located, rather, it is about who is doing the work and how it is getting done. In an excellent article from MIT Sloan – Management Review, a group’s collaborative capabilities far outway the importance of where they are located. The team’s social perceptiveness is key to the underlying collective intelligence. Identifying team strengths and creating a digital workspace is crucial for a high functioning remote team. Finding the right digital tools is also very important. We must especially prompt people to have creative parallel inputs… but how? 

When we worked solely in person, we would use sticky notes, or a napkin at a lunch meeting to capture ideas and answer the questions, “How might we/how could we accomplish the end goal?” The next step, inevitably, was to stick visual ideas to a wall, sift and sort through them, decipher what would/would not work. Now, we move forward with virtual meetings, utilizing MURAL, and can have everyone capture every idea, simultaneously. This allows us to easily inspire each other in real time.

Pro tip: check out our free downloadable MURAL templates for better meetings.

The next time you run into a problem that poses a challenge to your team, rather than simply setting up a conversation, pose a thoughtful question. Allow the entire team to start working in a MURAL template. Encourage everyone to read the others ideas so they can build on them. Create a conversation that inspires and that everyone can respond to in their own time.  

This is why we’re big fans of MURAL, the collaborative tool allows every thread to happen simultaneously, where multiple people can take notes and make edits, even if another person is talking. This tool allows for idea sharing without total chaos. Another bonus: you can save anything created in MURAL  so you can come back, build on, and polish ideas.

Are You Ready?

It is time to take your meetings to the next level, discover the power of the multi-threaded meeting in depth by utilizing some of our mural templates! You will walk away with templates to run your own multi-threaded meeting, new found knowledge of meeting facilitation and the ability to unleash you and your company!

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Recently I had the opportunity to sit in on a meeting where the phrase “the illusion of control” was used. It made my stomach turn. 

This meeting was around a company’s “custom” software offering. The thing I discovered was the software couldn’t be customized, just configured. There were only a few ways their templates could be tweaked, and those were all pre-determined. If a customer’s needs didn’t jibe with what the company’s product would allow, they were out of luck. 

Because of this, the senior-most exec told his subordinates they had to give customers “the illusion of control” vs. allowing anything that would actually be true customization. And that’s when it hit me. If this was the company’s behavior towards its customers, could its treatment of employees be any different? Do the execs just nod their heads and pay lip service, knowing full well the company is going to do whatever it wants to do?

Collaboration begins with authenticity

This company missed an opportunity to be a partner to its clients — and likely isn’t one to its employees either. If its leadership had attended one of our workshops, they’d learn the value of genuine collaboration. It starts with respect, and a willingness to listen and absorb rather than firing back with a knee-jerk response. 

By giving employees a role in decision-making, the exec I mentioned could’ve helped his employees become more self-confident. And those with confidence help the larger team — and organization as a whole — succeed. 

To help you build this kind of inclusive culture, we created these meeting mantras. They are the holy grail we follow to ensure that our meetings and all attendees are getting the best (genuine) experience out of them:

No Purpose. No Meeting.

Part of respecting your team is ensuring every meeting has a clear purpose. Scheduling a discussion with only a vague objective in mind wastes time and money. It can also torpedo your team’s morale. Show you value their time by creating an agenda that’ll keep everyone focused on specific outcomes. People appreciate having goals they can work towards, whether that’s coming up with fresh ideas or helping refine existing ones. 

Foster Emotional Safety.

When you do have meetings, you’ll want to create an environment where everyone feels they can speak freely. A great way to encourage inclusivity is to allocate a portion of each meeting to the sharing of everyone’s ideas. Be mindful about cutting off over-sharers so the chronically quiet will have a chance to speak up, too. Studies have shown that this kind of inclusiveness can accelerate the speed at which sound business decisions are reached, so it’s not just a wise practice from a team-building perspective. 

Capture Room Intelligence.

I’ve always felt that many minds are greater than one when it comes to collaborating and solving problems. That’s the idea behind room intelligence: no single person is smarter than any other person in the meeting. To ensure the collective intellect is properly leveraged, you’ll want a designated facilitator on hand to guide the group through its discussion and any structured activities. This person, or someone who’s been deputized, should also be capturing everything discussed for future reference. 

See all 10 of our meeting mantras here.

Keeping things on track

Creating a culture of true collaboration can be tough. As a leader, it’ll be up to you to encourage honesty and promote comradery. When you’re effective at this, you’ll see your team develop new ideas and innovative solutions. To keep you from slipping back into old routines, here are three practices you should embrace:

1. Have 1:1 discussions.

When someone feels like they weren’t heard or thinks someone else has too much influence, it’s important to talk it out one-on-one. Committing to having an open-door policy that lets you take a temperature with your team may help you uncover some interpersonal dynamics you weren’t aware of. This will help maintain a team environment that’s harmonious and focused on thriving together.

2. Agree to disagree and commit.

Productive meetings require decisions to be made. In addition to having a facilitator drive progress, you’ll also want to have a preselected decider. Ideally, this should be someone who’s qualified to make the call on how to move forward, either due to relevant experience or professional responsibilities. 

Keep in mind that achieving consensus doesn’t mean total and complete agreement. The philosophy behind disagree and commit, which is practiced by Amazon and Intel, is that it’s acceptable for people to disagree while decisions are being made. Once a decision has been made, however, the team needs to 100% agree to support it. It’s OK that not everyone buys in so long as the dissenters can commit to moving forward as a team.

3. Give everyone a say.

To minimize the divergence I mentioned above, I suggest your team use our Improv Vision Mood Board for online collaboration tools like Mural. Unlike a traditional mood board that’s merely cool visuals, our template will help everyone get aligned through visual and written exercises. 

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First, you’ll ask each team member to share two images. Then everyone will follow this up by placing sticky notes with their thoughts on what the collective vision makes possible — and what emotions the images evoke. After individual voting on these stickies, your team will then move on to crafting a unifying vision statement. 

Improvising a vision this way can spare you going through a long, protracted process. Too often teams focus on mission statements that capture the purpose of an entire enterprise when teams often just need something that can help them tap into creative potential and inspire action.

Trust your team — and the process

Fighting “fake” collaboration begins with valuing people’s thoughts, feelings, and time. Genuine collaboration really comes down to trust. Trust that colleagues and employees can help you make better decisions — and that you have an actual interest in hearing what’s on their minds. When this has been achieved, you’ll be surprised by the staggering business impact it’ll have. It’ll save time, save money and keep teams on task and ahead of schedule.

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Want to learn more?

If you’d like information about one of our Magical Meeting workshops or a consulting engagement, you can reach us at hello@voltagecontrol.com. 

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You’ve likely heard of differentiated learning in the classroom – the idea that individuals have different ways of learning (visual, aural, verbal, etc.) and therefore require diverse avenues of learning; one size does not fit all. This people-centered approach is also applicable to the workplace. Individuals have different working styles and needs. Therefore, they work best in certain environments and not as well in others.

Differentiation in the workplace requires you to first understand the individual needs and learning styles of your team members. To understand this is to truly understand how to work effectively with people. When you acknowledge your team members’ individual work styles, you are able to meet them where they are and provide them with what they need to thrive. 

Let’s explore what differentiated working looks like in day-to-day work, meetings, and workshops. 

Differentiation in the Workplace

Everyone on your team has their own version of working best. There are many factors that contribute to this including personality (introverted or extroverted), workstyle (optimal time of day to work, preference to work alone or collaborating with others, etc.), and learning style (learning by observing, doing, hearing, etc.). As a result, employees can suffer if they are confined to fit a certain work model that does not coincide with their needs and preferences.

For example, say you are holding an employee training for a new process being implemented. The training is a presentation-style meeting where the leader takes the team through the new process with a visual flowchart. Those who are visual learners will likely follow along well and retain the information. However, a psychical or hands-on learner may need to practice the process themselves in order to understand. If you do not account for the different learning styles in your team, you risk some employees misunderstanding or falling behind. 

No Team Member Left Behind

A team is only as strong as each individual in it. Get to know your team members learning and work styles so you can best support them. Maybe that’s sending out a questionnaire with questions and prompts to get to know each person’s learning style. Or hold one-on-ones to ask each person if they are getting what they need and if not how they can feel supported. You can use this information to categorize how team members work best and provide them with what they need when they need it. Once you have a good understanding of what everyone needs, you can adjust meetings accordingly to keep everyone on the same page.

For example, (using the previous new process team training scenario) you could offer hands-on training to identified physical learners and an informative video to visual learners. This way, each person not only receives what they need, but they also avoid wasting time engaging in a less effective method of training. 

Differentiated Meetings

Differentiated learning styles can cause some people to show up differently than their co-workers in meetings and workshops. If they are out of sync with the rest of the group, the entire group will end up suffering. For example, picture a group work session where an individual is not quite grasping the concept being discussed. If a facilitator fails to notice this disconnect and continues with the meeting anyway, the person will fall behind and become further disengaged. You then lose the crucial brain power and contribution of that person–and you need it! 

Supporting team members in meetings starts with the setup. Make sure that everyone is versed in the tools you’re using and is briefed on the topic before the meeting beings so there are no misunderstandings or gaps of knowledge. What this looks like: send an agenda beforehand that outlines the tools everyone will need to participate and the topics that will be discussed. Include a “how-to” video or written instructions to educate people on how to use the tool(s). If people need additional support, offer training. Also, assign any prep work necessary for everyone to be primed to participate. You want everyone on the same page once the meeting begins so you can get the most out of your time together. 

Once the meeting has begun, read the room and take note of where team members are at in the meeting. Does someone appear to be lost or disengaged? How can you adjust to bring them up to speed? Sometimes this looks like taking the person aside to answer questions or provide necessary context. Other times it requires adjusting for learning styles: some people may need time to process their thoughts internally before contributing their ideas to the group, while others thrive when spitballing their ideas out loud. Get to know your team and give them what they need to succeed, or find the best facilitator in your team.

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Continuous Learning

Differentiation in the workplace is fluctuating, so stay open to change and making adjustments as needed. People and connection are at the center of any great business. Keep them a priority by maintaining an open dialogue with your team about what they need. Some team members may grow in and out of certain work styles (think: remote vs. in-person work), or you could hire someone who has a different work style than you’re accustomed to. Adapt accordingly. 

You must also consider offering different versions of trainings and team work sessions as needed in order to really cater to individuals’ needs. Again, forcing people to conform to one certain style or way of doing things can stifle their performance. When we consider differentiated learning with our teams, we can maximize individual growth and performance. The stronger the individual the more effective the team is as a whole.

To learn how to facilitate the room with grace & ease check out our Professional Facilitation Workshop on July 13 + 14 here.

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This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

Yoram Solomon is a thought leader in the innovation field who focuses on the nature of creativity and the important role organizational culture plays in supporting innovative thought. A former Israeli Defense Forces marksman, he’s adept at nailing a physical target. However, Yoram’s sharpshooter precision isn’t limited to the shooting range. After years of studying the cognitive processes surrounding knowledge work and creativity, he’s pinpointed a single, necessary foundation: trust.

Lessons from the 90s

Defining a concept is easier when you first establishing what it is not. According to Yoram, innovation efforts that focus on specific technologies have a flawed approach. It’s tempting to jump on the bandwagon of the next big thing in technology. But the Gartner hype cycle illustrates where this approach quickly runs into issues.

In the beginning of the cycle, a new technology appears to be the answer to all the world’s problems. As organizations and individuals begin to explore its applications, interest begins to wane sharply as experiments fail to produce useful results. “There have been quite a few technologies that just died by the sidelines because they weren’t producing anything that was of value. Yet, we tend to latch onto those buzzwords.”

Nowadays, many companies are focused on innovation borne out of must-have technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Internet of Things, etc. These technologies are often considered the starting place for innovation, much like the website was in Silicon Valley in the late 90’s. “All you had to do if you wanted to be successful and innovative [in the 90’s] was just buy a website, add the dot com to your name and success was guaranteed.” The tunnel vision of the technology-based approach of yesterday provides a cautionary tale to modern organizations. “Of course, we know how [the dot com boom] ended. I think that one of the problems we have today is our focus on technologies.”

“All you had to do if you wanted to be successful and innovative [in the 90’s] was just buy a website, add the dot com to your name and success was guaranteed.”

Left without a clear starting point, many companies resort to a focus on processes to bring innovation into the organization. “There are people who swear by design thinking, lean startup, agile, anything…The thing is you focus on one process as if this process is going to generate ideas, and it doesn’t. It’s facilitating the generation of ideas.”

More resources isn’t the answer

Companies experiencing a dearth of ideas often fall into the trap of believing more resources thrown at the problem leads to better results. Yoram describes this fallacy through the story of the airplane. Samuel Langley, head of the Smithsonian Institute in the late 1900’s, received a $50,000 grant and a charter to build the first heavier-than-air, manned flying machine. On December 8th, 1903, he declared failure despite years of work and ample resources. “The funny thing is [that] not nine days later, on December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers, two bicycle makers from Ohio on a budget of $1,000, actually made it. So it’s not about money.”

This holds true for program resources as well as using financial rewards to incentivize employees. Creativity is a critical element of innovation, but the relationship between motivation and creativity lies in intrinsic factors. During his PhD research, Yoram set out to answer why people are so much more creative when they work for startups than in mature or large companies. He found that it mostly boils down to the type of work people are doing and whether it’s labor-intensive or knowledge-intensive. “If it’s just pure hard labor or effort, then if you give me incentives, I will work faster. That’s where financial incentives work. However, when it comes to tasks related to creativity, using your brain more than your hands or legs, financial incentives don’t help. They actually hurt.”

This conclusion is supported by an experiment done by scientist Sam Glucksberg adapting the candle problem created by psychologist Karl Duncker in which participants are given a box of tacks, a candle, and matches. The objective of the experiment involves attaching the candle to a wall so that, when lit, the wax doesn’t drop on the floor. Glucksberg extended the original experiment by offering participants in one group a financial incentive for solving the creative problem faster. The surprising results? Participants offered a financial incentive took 3.5 minutes longer to solve the problem than those who weren’t offered compensation.

Yoram’s own research shows the role resources can play in creativity as well. One person he interviewed shared that working in a startup forced him to be more creative because he didn’t have access to resources. Doing more with less led to more creative solutions. “So we tend to think that [if] we throw money at the problem we’re going to solve it. That’s true if what you’re trying to do is produce more light bulbs in the same amount of time. If what you’re trying to do is produce more ideas, don’t throw resources at it.”

“If what you’re trying to do is produce more ideas, don’t throw resources at it.”

So what should innovation programs be based on? Through his PhD research, Yoram discovered that “the one element that causes a company to be innovative on a consistent, continuous basis is having an innovation culture. And innovation culture is based on one thing, that’s trust.”

Structural gaps in building innovation culture

Yoram considers the implementation of innovation programs in two ways. First, he evaluates the cause and effect chain. “If you want to be innovative, you need to deploy the latest technologies and the latest processes in a very pragmatic way. But, in order to do that, you need to be motivated to go into ideation sessions so that they are going to be effective. For that to happen you need to have an innovation culture. For innovation culture to happen you need to have the right behaviors. To have the right behaviors, you need to have trust.”

The cause and effect chain Yoram describes creates a clear picture of why innovation programs that start at the endpoint — technologies, processes, and resources — often struggle to achieve productive results. “It starts with trust, behaviors, cultures, innovation culture, and then you have ideation processes, technologies, and you’ll find the next big thing.”

The Five I’s

Yoram works with organizations seeking to innovate by taking them through his 5 step process:

1. Introspection
2. Intervention
3. Ideation
4. Implementation
5. Innovation

The first step is characterized by a line he borrowed from the opening sequence of the pilot of the HBO TV show Newsroom. “The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one.” Starting with Introspection, Yoram challenges organizations to reflect on the level of trust that exists. Before the following steps can be fruitful, barriers to trust must be identified and removed.

The second step, Intervention, identifies what steps need to be taken to remove barriers to trust. “Once I can tell you that we have an innovation culture, [we can] move on to ideation.”

Ideation — step 3 — is where processes like design thinking are productive. Employees who do the difficult work of making it through steps 1–3 became frustrated when ideas are shelved and nothing happens with them.

The fourth step, Implementation, is critical in putting the ideas from step 1–3 into action as well as maintaining high morale. Successful execution of steps 1–4 leads to step 5, Innovation.

The trickle down effect

Yoram has found that building an innovation culture starts with the leadership team.

“You start with the leadership team for two reasons. One is [that] the leadership team controls the largest amount of resources. The second is [that] whatever the leadership team’s behavior is trickles down. It’s imitated, copied, and followed by the rest of the organization.”

If those behaviors don’t exist at the highest level, there’s still hope for building innovation culture further down the chain. “The best example of this is Kelly Johnson who created the Skunk Works group at Lockheed Martin. He said, ‘I don’t care how the organization above me behaves, all I care about is that we’re going to have the right culture in our organization below me.’”

After years of work and study, Yoram has a formula for building trust. One of the first elements is shared values. “If we don’t have shared values, I’m not going to trust you, and you’re not going to trust me.” Another aspect of building trust is the intensity of human interaction. “A big part of this goes back to the 10,000 hour rule that Ericsson found. The more time I spend with you, the better we’re going to build trust.”

Yoram points out that the time of interaction also hinges on the intensity of that interaction. “The work of Albert Mehrabian, published in the book Silent Messages, says that 7% of our intent is conveyed through our words, 38% through our tone of voice, and 55% through our body language. So one powerful thing I encourage is to spend more time face-to-face with the people you need to work with and trust.”

Constructive disagreement

As human interaction increases, so does the likelihood for disagreement. Yoram believes a key behavior in continuing down the path of trust building is the ability to have constructive disagreement. “Let’s say that you and I are arguing over something. What happens if all of a sudden you have an idea that will make my case instead of yours. Would you share it?” The answer to this question helps to elucidate the level of trust between colleagues. “If the answer is no, then we’re not really conducting a constructive disagreement. You have to get to the point where, if I have an idea that would actually make your point, I feel comfortable bringing it up.”

The constructive nature of this disagreement is that the goal for each individual is not to win the argument but for both parties to reach the shared goal of their team. “Unfortunately, what we do today is have destructive disagreements where everything becomes emotional and irrational, and really all I want is to win. Maybe even more than I want to win, I want you to lose and that is a problem.”

The option that many people opt for in the face of destructive disagreement is the safer, less conflict-ridden approach of agreeing to disagree. “When we say let’s agree to disagree, what I’m saying is you have your position. I don’t care why. I have my position. I don’t care to share with you why, so let’s agree to disagree and not pursue this. That means that our focus is on winning and not on reaching the overall goal.”

Prospect theory & human interaction

Another aspect of human interaction in trust building is the ratio of positive to negative experiences. Drawing conclusions from the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Yoram posits that positive and negative interactions at a ratio higher than 3:1, respectively, produce a net positive experience and contribute to greater trust building.

“We are three times more worried about negative things than we are about positive things. If you and I have an interaction and it’s negative, it’s going to take three positive interactions just to compensate.”

Yoram, ever a proponent for constructive disagreement, believes that positive interactions can include arguments. “A positive interaction can be that you and I will argue to the point where we lose our voices, but if we reach a conclusion and we’re both happy with what we reach, that would be a very positive outcome.”

New, useful, and feasible

With innovation culture well established, organizations can consider ideas through the lens of innovation which Yoram defines as something new, useful, and feasible. He bases this definition off what the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office uses to determine whether something should be allowed to be a patent.

“I can file a patent for the first teleporter. It’s new. It doesn’t exist. It is useful. It allows us to go from one place to another without using roads or consuming fuel. It’s a bit problematic when we get to the feasible part because I really don’t know how to [build] it.”

Innovation has to meet those three criteria, “but as far as what it can be — it can be a product, a service, a process, or a business model. Uber did not invent a car. They created a new business model.”

Within those categories, innovation can be incremental or radical. Incremental innovation has significant value to Yoram. “USB 3.0 was incremental, but it has a lot of value because there are more than four billion ports [shipped] every year.” Radical innovation, the other extreme, supplants an existing approach entirely.

“Gary Hamel said once in a Stanford executive morning briefing, ‘Those who live by the sword are shot by those who don’t.’”

Revenue alone is a weak measurement

In formulating his metrics for innovation, Yoram looks for a few key characteristics. “The data has to be available, and it has to be relatively easy to measure and calculate.” Measurement approaches that consider revenue more generally run into problems when evaluated against this criteria. The New Product Vitality Index (NPVI), considers the percentage of gross revenue generated from products launched in the past X years. “One of the problems is, how do you define X? For example, is it what percentage of revenue we generate from a product that didn’t exist four years ago?”

To illustrate the problem, Yoram compares the iPhone 6S and the vacuum cleaner. The iPhone 6S didn’t exist four years ago, and neither were later models like the iPhone 8. “Do we count the revenue from the iPhone 6S as revenue from innovation because it didn’t exist four years ago?” On the other hand, vacuum cleaners last forever in the market and there’s a lot of brand loyalty. “So if I asked myself what percentage of my revenue is generated for both

Yoram’s measurement of choice, which he calls the Growth Innovation Index (GII), instead focuses on percentage of profit growth.

“If you have products that are in the first half of their market life cycle, this is where you make a lot of profit. Once we reach maturity, that’s when the product margins become cutthroat.”

For Yoram to view a company as innovative he wants to see that a majority of their products are in the first half of their market lifecycle where a higher margin of profit can be gained. “I’m not talking about revenue. What I care about is how profit grows in your company. This is what distinguishes an innovative market leader from a ‘me too’ player.”

Pragmatism in innovation

Yoram approaches the idea of failure with humor. “The funny thing is I never failed in my life. I was always successful. Obviously that’s not true. I failed more than I’ve succeeded.” But Yoram believes failure that involves learning is success.

His experience with PCTEL taught him the value of pragmatism in innovation. In 2000, PCTEL was the second fastest growing company in Silicon Valley that endeavored to reduce the cost of dial-up modems by relying on the CPU’s processing power in order to power the modem. When DSL came into the picture, PCTEL attempted to use the same strategy to lower the cost of DSL modems. “Today, when I teach at SMU I tell [my students] there are four factors that make your company successful. One of them is trust and another one is pragmatism. Where PCTEL failed [with DSL] was a lack of pragmatism. There are reasons why a DSL modem will never be internal to a PC. [It’s] because you want to share it. PCTEL did not realize what their immediate customer, which at this point was the service provider, was going to face when deploying an internal DSL modem.”

Customers who were unable to get DSL service in their area were forced to send back the entire PC, not just the modem. “Why as a PC manufacturer or service provider [would] I want that? It sunk about $10,000,000 of investment because the project lacked pragmatism.”

“I truly believe the one thing that stops every organization, the most innovative in the world, is not having trust.”

The thing that excites Yoram the most right now is helping organizations build trust. He begins engagements with the question, “Do you think you have a high level of trust?” For organizations who answer “no”, Yoram advises them to start with trust and innovation will come. “How do you know I’m excited? Because I work 16 to 18 hours a day, seven days a week and I don’t feel like I’m working. I feel that I have this mission now. I truly believe the one thing that stops every organization, the most innovative in the world, is not having trust.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post It’s All About Trust appeared first on Voltage Control.

I’m passionate about alignment. Yup, alignment. It might not be the sexiest topic in the startup world, but it’s essential to success. (It’s the reason I fell in love with Design Sprints, as they are a fantastic way to build alignment with disparate stakeholders.) Lack of focus may be the #1 killer of startups, but I believe that lack of alignment is why many organizations fail to ever realize their mission.

So, if you’re ready to align your team, I’ve assembled ten of my favorite methods. Start applying some of these and please share back what you discover!

1. Define a Shared Vocabulary

Here’s where I suggest you start: make sure everyone in your company is speaking the same “language.” When individuals or teams use different terms or define things in contradictory ways, some (if not all) of your efforts will be thwarted. That’s why I recommend establishing a shared dictionary or lexicon.

The level of effort to create your dictionary will vary depending on the size and age of the company. Begin by meeting with each team and reviewing their standard reports, metrics, and assets. Identify terms that mean different things for different groups and look for groups that use a variety of words for the same concept. Document and socialize these differences. Work toward creating documentation of your organization’s official terms and definitions, whether through a PDF or internal website.

2. Use the “Note & Vote” Technique

The Note & Vote activity is my favorite take-away from the Google Design Sprint. It’s a great tool to drop into any workshop agenda, or even a staff meeting. What I love about this tool is that it combines focused individual work, as well as the power of collective wisdom.

Here’s how it works in a nutshell: start by having the team individually generate ideas, challenges, or solutions. Then, everyone shares their favorite ideas with the group. Once everyone has shared, each person votes for their top concepts or ideas. (Depending on the size of the team and your time constraints, adjust the amount of individual work time, the number of favorites shared, and the number of votes per person.) This method is a great way to avoid groupthink, give everyone a voice, and come up with new, “out of the box” ideas.

3. Leverage Tools for Visibility

Without visibility, teams with the best of intentions may think they’re aligned, only to realize that they have drifted apart. There are many tools for creating visibility. Kanban and metrics dashboards are my two go-to strategies for creating visibility. For Kanban, I typically recommend Trello or Jira. While Trello is simple and easy to get started, Jira has much better support for software projects. For metrics, there a gazillion options these days, but I’ve been enjoying Klipfolio, and Looker is also quite nice.

Regardless of which tool you have, create a culture of actually using the tool. For example, make sure your standups and status meetings revolve around the Kanban board. Whenever a status changes, update your Kanban immediately. Review and analyze your metrics dashboards daily, if not more frequently.

4. Schedule One-On-Ones

If you aren’t doing one-on-ones, I’ve got to break it to you: you must start. There is no excuse—not even a small team! Managers, and especially executives, have the luxury of seeing the forest for the trees. One-on-ones are one of the most important tools you have to identify problems, opportunities, and see across your team to create alignment. They allow you to understand what motivates your team, their fears and concerns, and their challenges. So, if someone reports to you, I suggest weekly one-on-ones. I know everyone is busy, but I don’t recommend doing them bi-weekly. Schedule them for every week and commit!

5. Spend Two Hours Defining Your Purpose

I’m a big fan of Liberating Structures, which is a set of 33 tools and techniques that can be used to align groups. I highly recommend checking out all of their activities, but I will outline two of my favorite LS techniques here and in the next recommendation.

Purpose-to-Practice (P2P) is designed to help your group “design the five essential elements for a resilient and enduring initiative” in just two hours. By following the ingredients and agenda for this structured working session, your group will ultimately answer five important questions: “What rules must we absolutely obey to succeed in achieving our purpose?”, “Who can contribute to achieving our purpose and must be included?”, “How must we organize (both macro- and microstructures) and distribute control to achieve our purpose?”, and “What are we going to do? What will we offer to our users/clients and how will we do it?”

This is a helpful activity at the start of a startup journey or when you need to get your team back on the same page about your mission, customers, and strategies.

6. Encouraging People to Ask for Help

Another Liberating Structures activity that I find very effective for alignment is called “What I Need From You” (WINFY). This method only takes about an hour and spurs people to ask their colleagues for the things they need to be successful. In this activity, individuals make a list of what they want from others, share it, and then receive an unambiguous response of: yes, no, I will try, or whatever. This activity creates a safe space where teams can find clarity about roles, needs, and expectations.

What I like about WINFY is that it breaks down our assumptions about each other. We find out what people on the team are wanting, but not getting, or, conversely, when someone is making incorrect assumptions about what others want from them. This framework encourages collaboration among peers and is especially effective for executives who are often downward-focused, when they need to be horizontally-focused.

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7. Ensure Your Meetings are Inclusive
If you want to have an aligned team, you can’t have meetings where only a few people speak and share. Follow some simple rules to make sure that your meetings are inclusive spaces where everyone feels empowered to contribute. First, prepare by having a clear goal and agenda; this will keep everyone on track. If you have people that tend to monopolize discussions, you might want to initiate the “Note & Vote” activity mentioned above; it’s a good way to get more people involved in conversation and decision-making.

Another thing to be aware of, especially as a leader, is the tone of your meetings. Ask yourself: How is criticism and disagreement handled? Do individuals say “Yes, and…” or just shut each other down? Are ideas attributed and recognized or ignored? Take note of the tenor of your meetings and work to correct any bad habits before they become too ingrained in the culture.

8. Repetition. Repetition.

In almost everything in life, consistency is key. I think management needs to be particularly aware of this in terms of communicating with your team. You can’t assume that stating your strategy in one standup will be enough to institute new thinking and drive lasting change.

I once heard a CEO explain the same thing five times in one day to different groups. It didn’t matter if he was addressing the execs, the entire company, an intern, or the board. He patiently and consistently explained the same thing, with the same language. The message stayed the same. This kind of redundancy is monotonous and annoying, but it is crucial if you want to keep your team aligned. As an organization grows, the challenge is insuring consistency as you scale beyond your ability to do it in person.

9. Schedule a “Roles & Coffee” Meeting

Roles & Coffee is a more surgical tool that is useful when you have two employees who are having trouble working together. Often, when two team members are struggling to get along, it is due to weak assumptions about roles, responsibilities, and capabilities.

Ask them to find time to have a coffee together. When they sit down, they should take turns describing the role and responsibilities of the other person. By simply asking each other, “What do you think I do?”, they’ll be able to clarify the misconceptions that are standing in their way. While there are times when behavioral issues are at play, I’ve found this activity can clear the air for most situations.

10. Don’t Forget Postmortems

When major projects or initiatives end, teams are often ready to move on and forget all about what they just launched. They are onto the next thing or just plain exhausted. But, it’s crucial to schedule postmortems after important projects to reflect and talk through lessons learned.

During your retrospective, let team members share what worked well so it can be celebrated and repeated next time. Also, find out what didn’t go well and try to get to the root cause. I find that the classic trick of asking WHY? five times helps you dig into what went wrong. Work to foster a culture where it is ok to mess up, fail, and ultimately grow from hiccups and mistakes.

I hope you are able achieve more alignment by applying a few of these methods. With more alignment, your team will be happier, you’ll get more done, and you will increase the odds that you are doing the right things. All of this naturally adds up to a healthier, more resilient organization.

The post 10 Practical Ways to Align Your Team appeared first on Voltage Control.